Business

Google hits accused copyright infringers

After flying a blacked-out logo in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the winter, Google last week partially relented by listing sites accused of copyright infringement farther down in search results, while up-listing pages run by jilted content distributors.

“This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify,” Amit Singhal, a Google engineer, wrote on the company’s blog.

The Motion Picture Association of America’s response was positive, but the trade group was hardly satisfied.

“We are optimistic,” MPAA spokesman Howard Gantman said in a statement. “We will be watching this development closely — the devil is always in the details— and look forward to Google taking further steps to ensure that its services favor legitimate businesses and creators, not thieves.”

Google will soon decide to down-rank a site based on the number of complaints it receives under Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the current industry standard, along with its own highly technical sense of whether the purpose of a page is piracy.

The search leviathan said it doesn’t have a specific threshold for how many complaints are necessary to warrant a down-ranking, and since Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Tumblr employ different copyright-complaint procedures than the DMCA, the new policy won’t affect those user-generated sites.

Still, not everyone is a fan of Google’s decision.

“Takedown requests are nothing more than accusations of copyright infringement,” said the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a vocal SOPA foe. “Google’s opaque policies not only threaten lawful sites, but they undermine our confidence in its search results.”